Lateral Shift Movements on Field Camera

[Eugene]

Jason, I think that many of the contributers to this thread have confused front and rear SWING movements with front and rear SHIFT movements. Front and rear shift, rise, and fall will not distort the image, but too much movement will run out of image circle coverage from the lens and vinette the corners. Swing movements front and rear, on the other hand, will distort the image, as well as run out of lens coverage. All of these movement capabilities are a necessity for table-top work with a monorail camera in a studio environment, but only a nice convenience to have on a wooden camera that is used for field work. That was Robert's original inquiry.

[Gary Frost]

Both front and rear _swing_ can be applied in such a way (the lens and film can be kept parallel, and parallel to the subject if desired) that it is _exactly_ the same a applying shift directly. The swings used independently can also alter plane of sharp focus and perspective. A camera in your hands is worth more to understand these movements than all the explanation in this thread.

[Brian C. Miller]

Carpe camera?

[Sandy Sorlien]

To introduce the opposite situation and really confuse everybody, you can also use lateral SHIFT (plus tripod rotation) instead of SWING to get a SWING effect in some situations! I have a monorail camera that I use in the field, with all movements. When I'm photographing a diminishing line of buildings, the wide-angle lens exaggerates the bigness of the near building and the smallness of the far. To make the angle of the line of buildings less oblique and reduce this exaggeration, you can use SWING to align the film plane more closely to the line of buildings. (Rear swing to re-align, then front swing to re-focus.) But you can also do this same thing by simply rotating the whole camera via the tripod head so that the angle is less oblique. At that point, you will have lost some of your faraway buildings. Now use rear or front shift to move the image back onto the ground glass the way you had it before.

You may ask: why do this if you have swing? answer: it's quicker and doesn't seem to require as much re-focusing.

I wonder if others use this rotate-and-shift technique and whether it is truly the same as using swing. It seems so to me, but I am not that experienced so maybe I am missing something.

Cheers, Sandy

[james mickelson]

I would say I use it about 1/3 of the time when shooting. I use it for perspective manipulation of objects at different distances from the lens film.

[Dick Roadnight]

Buy yourself a nice Sinar p monorail - why compromise.

[Jeff Scott]

What Sandy explained is the same principal I was explaining about rotating the camera and using shift to reset the edges of the image to what was desired. This is most effective with wide angle lenses as they tend to distort the image towards the sides. Yes shifting does not in and of itself distort the image but in combination with rotating the camera you can in affect change the shape of the image.